One Long Sentence
Upon reaching the age of fifty and, in the eyes of the most respected contemporary critics, a level of aesthetic achievement once thought unreachable in the fractured publishing market of the day, Ansel Gustav Robinson retired from his position as the Director of Writing at a land grant university in the central plains of the upper Midwest and, with the money he’d been awarded through the MacArthur Foundation’s famously nicknamed “Genius Grant,” purchased a small cabin in the mountains near Chattanooga where, fully and finally freed from the responsibilities both to maintain his famous writing program and, more difficultly, given his life-long (yet contained) agoraphobia, to interact with his fellow beings who, with all their hidden passions and desires, not to mention the wishes they wore across their chests like sequined vests, disgusted Ansel, he was able to begin the solitary work he’d often daydreamed of while organizing syllabi, or hounding his secretary to fill out paperwork, the work of creating the absolute and only perfect sentence, the kind of sentence the best of novelists awake from brief, transcendent dreams about, within which every word deserves its place, either as the proper predicate or subject or, for workhorse words like articles (as well as prepositions), as the perfect rhythmic counterweight for, unlike Dostoevsky (or some hacky sci-fi upstart), Ansel knew the power of rhythm, how it could lull his reader into a comfortable peace or, in crueler, more advanced passages, rip them from their seats for a sustained moment, make them pace their rooms and think, though Ansel knew his ideal sentence would not let his reader get away so easy as that, but rather it would rivet them in place with its sheer power, would create in its reader the feeling that they were trapped in a small glass box, one they must wear over their heads for the rest of their lives, through which they could see their fellow beings and friends but which, through the sentence’s power, would always separate them, the task of creating which, Ansel knew, would not be easy, but would require him to be diligent, which he was, to create a schedule, which he did, and to dedicate his whole being to its creation, like the monk of ancient times who, from devotion to greater things, sits in silence in the belly of his monastery, copying out holy words till the day he dies, which Ansel found difficult for, though he had perfected his schedule over the first few months he’d spent locked away inside his cabin, discovering that nighttime work suited him best, for it was then when the squirrels and blackbirds slept and only cicadas cried, a sound so constant it passed over him like chanting, and though he never once left the writing desk he’d set at his only window, distractions tried to smother his work with every tool they had, be it by bringing rise to an itch above his lip, where he’d begun to grow a beard so as not to waste his precious time each morning shaving, which, because to scratch it meant to move his fingernail in rhythm, a rhythm much in contrast to the rhythm of his sentence, could cause him to lose a full hour of work, the time it took for him to recall his proper rhythm, or by taking the form of a flaming horse, which galloped nightly through his window (though he kept it closed), scattering his papers and marching through the whole of his cabin with such a din he began to hear the quiet whispers in it, whispers bound so close together that they made the sound of hoofbeats, and though at first Ansel tried to ignore these sounds, pulling cotton from the pillow he slept upon to dam his ear canals, one day, defeated, he sat back in his folding chair and listened to them, attentive as a mouse in a concrete tunnel through which it knows a cobra runs, and through the hoofbeats he made out words, senseless words at first, but soon words strung along with order enough for him to make out senseless phrases, combinations like fully and finally freed from and, more imagistically, lights on the pointed spine, phrases which, though he found them beautiful, he worried might poison his great, important sentence for, when he mouthed them silently through his bearded lips, he could not help but picture first a woman half his age, thin as an iron gate post, resting her head on her skinny arm at the register of the grey and blue steel cafeteria of a shipping warehouse, and second a grey-green fleshy light that emanated from a thin wet sack of some sort underwater, in some place devoid of time, both of which images filled him with a desire of a sort he had not yet experienced, though he would be fifty-one soon, an open and almost luminescent desire, that of a lovesick man venting his grief to the stars, a desire which, when he reflected on it from his writing desk, disgusted him but, when one night, exhausted from a year of constant work, he strolled out through the cold dark woods and reflected on it once again, he realized he felt a strong devotion to, as though it could, when viewed from a great distance (like that he’d put between himself and the rest of the known universe), be mistaken for himself, his desire-self, and once he realized this simple truth about his being, he found himself frightened of sitting back at his writing desk, for it was there he’d mistaken desire for a poison, and from that night on, instead of writing his sentence out, he spent his working hours curled up like a pill bug at the base of one of the thin pine trees near his cabin, where, if he waited in silence long enough, he could see the flaming horse pass through again, and listen to the whispers of its hoofbeats, whispers which outdoors he could hear clearer than before, the blessedness of absent space or opened onto vistas of dead tongues, phrases which, the more he repeated them to himself, or his desire-self, the more he knew the images he yearned after, that the woman at the register had buried her mother two decades ago and, though she sang as she filled the ketchup dispensers, the song only served to make her feel alone, or that the light in the sack in the sea beyond time was a symbol, imagistically, of life and hope prevailing in a place of ambient death, and sitting with these images, feeling he was marinating in them, he felt suddenly their source must be divine for, simply letting them exist with him, he’d forgotten his own name, that word which, just two years ago, seemed of some chief importance, but which, at night in the woods in the shape of a bug, as he was then, held no purpose for him, as useless in his daily life as an adverb would be in his perfect sentence, nothing but several letters of dead weight, this reflection only heightening his devotion to these divine signs of the night, these whispered hoofbeats, so that he let two years pass before he returned to his writing desk, electing instead to continue curling up at night, listening to the whispers of the woods, letting the phrases it offered him coalesce, so that, reflecting on them, he saw the woman filling ketchup dispensers glance behind her to the cafeteria tables, hoping openly that someone there might call her by her name, saw the sack of dim light hum and grow, which meant it wanted to burst apart and let its life and hope spread through the world, both images which, he understood, said clearly he should go back to his sentence, writing it not, as he had before, like an exact mathematic specimen but, instead, as a reflection of the divine, in fact a divine re-creation, which task he began immediately, moving his writing desk outdoors where he could listen to the whispers of the flaming hoofbeats and, as quick as he was able, copy them down, letting his wrist rest for a time afterward before judging each phrase that was given to him for its place in his one perfect sentence, a process which, for all the phrases that were given to him, took stretches of time beyond what he’d imagined, stretches which, because the hoofbeats gave him more phrases every night, seemed to amount to, in total, ten thousand years, though in truth they only amounted to a dozen, six years into which he realized his task should not be deletion but, in the spirit of his devotion, elongation, the creation of words and phrases of his own which he used to connect his divine phrases, creating in this way a sentence of some considerable length, when so often before he’d thought of the perfect sentence as having very few words, maybe just seven, though as he worked on through the years he came to realize the merits of the long sentence, how itself, in its very form, required devotion from its reader, that same devotion to the divine he hoped his perfect sentence would reproduce, a devotion of his own he hoped would spill into his writing, coating every word with his intent, though, as he wrote further and further, he cared less about his own intent and more about the needs of the divine, transforming his mild performance anxiety into something more like hope, the hope that he might be the proper vessel, this transformation filling him with no little comfort, for now he wrote with the rigor of one performing a time-worn ritual, not to mention the calm of a deep trance, and when he finished his sentence, ten days before he turned sixty-five, he was able to sign it Ansel, for he’d remembered his name, and he was able to pack his things and leave his cabin, from which he took a Greyhound bus to his agent’s office in Minneapolis, amazed as well as inspired she was his agent still, using some of this inspiration, in their meeting, to detail his perfect sentence, allowing it to build his courage enough he could set on her desk all forty notebooks he had written his sentence in, each one scrawled out in a smaller hand, to which his agent did not respond at first but instead bit her lower lip at, unsure what might be the proper way to tell Ansel, an author she hadn’t thought of in years, now hidden behind a long white beard and clothes so clean and oversized they seemed to be worn by someone else besides him, someone untainted by unwashed decades in the mountains, how to tell him he had been all but forgotten except as some sort of punchline or, in kinder times, a tale of caution for young writers about what happens when you become far too self-serious, what perversions take hold of you, and while she tried to put together the perfect thing to say, she went to the pile of notebooks on her desk, flipping through their dirt-stained pages as though looking for the words, this action, as seen by Ansel, a silent acceptance of his manuscript, an admission she would look at it, the thought of which sent Ansel into a final contentment, the woman’s nametag read aloud as she cleaned the cafeteria, this contentment sufficient enough for him to leave the office, in fact to leave his notebooks there, to take the bus to a hotel outside town, near Wisconsin, where he rented a room, set his things beside the unmade bed, and died, the story of which soon became like legend, every step he took from the office to his death lent the weight of predestination as though, once his sentence was passed along, he could move on, could let his spirit do whatever it is spirits do at the body’s death, perhaps whisper, perhaps rest, and to his agent’s surprise, interest gathered around his sentence, people called her office with generous offers to publish it, so she passed it along to a friend at Penguin Random House, glad, she found, to be fully and finally rid of it, for now she had no need to ever read the thing, the publishing company had to, though in fact no one at the publishing company read it either, for so long was the sentence that they worried interest would wane before someone finished it, and instead hired thirty-eight typists to type it up, thirty-six of whom were given just one notebook and two of whom were given two notebooks each, the shorter first four, so that they had the book together in two months, all seven volumes, for the sentence was too long to fit in one, a fact that worried the publishing company some because they thought it might dissuade consumers, though in fact it was much closer to a boon for them, because most readers bought all seven volumes at once, all ten hard-backed pounds of his one sentence, the kind of technical achievement that, before the books were even released, had the critics speaking of it as this year’s most important literary event, calling for the American Nobel, a posthumous Pulitzer, and these the right critics as well, the ones who’d helped him land the “Genius Grant” that had led to his perfect sentence, the kind of critics who could (and did) make the sentence a best seller, given that the publishing company fudged things a bit and had each volume sold count as one individual sold book, not that the book didn’t sell a lot, because it did, and in fact for some months straight all seven volumes could be found on coffee tables and bookshelves and even writing desks around America (as well as other anglophone countries, from New Zealand to India), not to mention its chief place on Instagram feeds of a certain kind, both its seven unmarked covers (their only design being ANSEL’S SENTENCE written out in capital letters) and choice passages both zoomed in on and underlined, swiftly sweeping the self’s short deck and suffocated yet protected, all tellingly from the first hundred pages or so of the first volume for, as was whispered confidentially in college towns from Saskatchewan to Nigeria, especially in those special moments when one shy student gains another’s confidence by sliding beside them on an advisor’s couch and quickly confessing some minor imagined cultural defect as though it were an unforgivable sin, no one had been able, at least so far, to read past the second volume, not because the sentence was bad by any measure (and in fact most who read it past the twentieth page found it great, near all-encompassing), but because of the time and concentration the sentence demanded of its reader (yes, the devotion it yearned for), a concentration which, due to its innumerable subjunctive, dependent clauses, each nestled inside each other for several pages before the first real verb gained form, surpassed that of the average lengthy sentence, stretched on so long nobody had the proper time to devote themselves to it, for they had jobs and children to get to first, and desires beyond reading one long sentence (a sentence so long even the most hermetic professors and critics struggled with it, for they too needed to shower and eat, as well as use the bathroom), and with time this lack of readership became a sort of joke, people calling it Ansel’s One-Thousand Year Sentence, though in fact it would have taken only forty days to read, forty full days that is, assuming its reader did nothing else during those days, not even eat, not even sleep, and many said, those who took a crack at it, that not only was the sentence far too long, but as one read it one felt a certain doom within one’s self, yes it was a doom, perhaps because the sentence felt so long one imagined oneself dying before one could finish it, though that doesn’t quite explain it still, for one does imagine finishing it, but one sees oneself much older at the end, sealed off from the world for ten thousand years as they read it, and now that one’s back in the world having finished the sentence, one cannot help but feel the world has changed, has in fact become an entirely different place, a sprawling desert inhabited by rocks, sentient rocks, and that the sentence itself was written in another language, one which by chance alone appeared as Middle American English, though in fact it was not a human language at all, but something greater, something so beyond human language it appeared as a sort of curse, or a fleshy film that covered everything, even light, and it was usually at this point readers quit the book, the four hundred and somethingth page of volume two, some tossing it in the fireplace, wondering at the great grief that must have smothered Ansel at his death, others taking to internet magazines and literature podcasts to describe their experiences with the sentence, warning others to stay away if they could, which warnings, due to the apparent legitimacy of their despair, were heeded duly by most literary citizens, who, after a requisite three-month period in which they were allowed to truly fear his sentence, began to see Ansel’s final work as a sort of absurd joke, the labors of a manic man who’d lost what he’d had of his sanity and humanity, and the general view of the work’s once-great renown became that it was something like collective folly, a faddish delusion of someone else’s grandeur, because of which, for a while at least, people stopped paying so much attention to their favorite author’s sentences but instead on their plots and characters, on the meanings of the sentences they read and the way each in its sequence made them feel, not on the technicalities of bare technique, on the chisel the sculptor works with and not the granite javelin he makes, the same mislaid focus that made a space for Ansel, allowing him this final act of excess.
Yes, it truly was a perfect sentence.